Executive Misconduct

Author's note:

A one-off this time. Apologies for the occasional technical jargon. CW for violence, drugging etc. But this is a noncon story, so you should be warned by the category. Enjoy:

It all came down to money, Alina Grachev thought as she looked at herself in the mirror in the women's bathroom underneath the convention floor.

Every time she had to talk at an event, Alina showed up early for the lavalier mic, then a quick, nervous dash for the nearest private place to catch a breath. But this time was different.

She knew it. Everyone in the auxiliary meeting room--now packed to standing room with researchers, engineers, industry footsoldiers, hacks and code evangelists--knew it. Because she'd looked over the financial documents and called the contracted customers of FORGEX over the last weeks and found they could not possibly have made $417 million in revenue from Large Language Model adoption FORGEX CEO Lawrence Reynolds claimed in the last quarter.

Fraud, in essence, was what she would describe before all those people.

But Alina was not a computer scientist. She was barely an economist. It still baffled her, sometimes, her path from the history department journal through the Institute for Historical Political Economy to Petroleum Profit Analysis & Research Group and now, at last, to an analyst's desk for Shockley, Shockley and Berkowitz.

Three months out from 26 and she was the youngest associate analyst at the firm since the Truman administration and the only one without an Ivy degree.

She'd rewatched

Michael Clayton

the night before, alone in her modest suite on the 13th story (14th floor, per the elevator) of the conference hotel, because it stoked the depressive euphoria that follows the discovery of unmitigated evil. In the days after she'd concluded FORGEX was lying to the Securities and Exchange Commission, she'd walked around her fourth floor walk-up muttering bible passages and stanzas of Eliot to herself while the winter light outside faded.

She checked her watch, set a habitual four minutes fast, brushed a loose hair back behind her ear and turned for the door.

Alina switched the lav mic on as she entered the dark hall. Up on stage, Lawrence Reynolds sat on his barstool, his custom-designed Allbirds pumping up and down on the lowest rung.

"There she is," Lawrence said. "The naysaying bean counter herself."

"Be nice, Lawrence!" the moderator, a stout fifty-something, said.

As she approached the stage, Alina could feel the eyes on her, a hundred eyes, a thousand eyes, all this money! All these people!

Up the risers, one-two-three, then left into the light. She paused, stared into the halo from the rafters and the silent dark beyond. A few muffled noises reached her: the rustle of fabric as a man uncrossed his legs, the scratch of a notetaker's pen, a faint sigh of anticipation. Intimate sounds. Close sounds.

She didn't remember the first minutes of the panel, just the impression. Sparring, nervous laughter. She underplayed her findings, the sweat starting under her white blouse as she fought to avoid Lawrence's eyes.

"That is a non-GAAP measure, Mr. Reynolds," she said. "Now, I know California culture encourages a certain laxity in accounting practices but--"

"Of course you'd say that!" He said. "Because you New Yorkers don't understand that technology is built on dreams. And you have to burn money to get it running. That's what that measure is: Our commitment to the dream. The dream of an Artificial General Intelligence that can do everything: Build a marketing campaign, make a movie, be your personal servant. At FORGEX we're forging the future, and we're doing it cheaper than our competitors."

"Really what you're doing is counting $280 million in credits for the use of subsidiary data centers owned by your Web Service Provider as revenue," she said. "And as an investment. You've double-counted, really triple-counted, since it's a discount not--"

She could feel the blood creeping up her neck, the blush, when he interjected.

"Of course it's revenue!" He said.

"Please, let's talk revenue," she said and leaned forward. "Because when we look at the statistics for your consumer-facing products, rather than the enterprise suite, we see 37% of registered users have a.edu email address and 34% are paying with a parent's credit card. Which means your user base is high schoolers and college students. You've built a plagiarism machine, Lawrence, not AGI. And that sector doesn't even turn a profit!"

"Of course it doesn't turn a profit!" He said. "Startups don't turn profits. You'd know that if you had more than a bachelor's in, what was it?" He snapped his fingers at the moderator.

"Russian History and English Comparative Literature are Ms. Grachev's specialties," the moderator said. "But this panel discussion is supposed to be about AI use cases for publicly traded growth firms."

A general roll of laughter. Cold anger spread in her chest.

"If I could catch you," she said. "You're not as good as you think."

"Catch? That's the SEC's job. They haven't come knocking, why? Because Innovation. They know what we do is vital to the--"

"Ability of your Web Service Provider to count an unprofitable division as profitable and get a nice bump after their earnings call," she said.

A murmur in the audience, scratching pens. She closed her eyes. Those would be the reporters, the other analysts. The bloodhounds.

"--National security of the United States," Lawrence finished.

But the wind had gone from him a bit. Alina opened her eyes, fixed him with them. He was a strong man, a year or two shy of forty, thick in the shoulder and hip, but he wasn't tall. If he'd worn insoles he might've reached her height, 5 feet 11 inches. Her height had been the first thing about her to draw unwanted gazes.

Once Lawrence Reynolds had been handsome, but his face had long ago lost any semblance of humanity and become a blank, manipulated mask. No sweat, no pores, no age lines: a plain of unchanging skin, an impermeable barrier between self and world. For a second, as he flashed a grin at her across the stage, she thought the spread of his smile might never stop and the corners of his mouth would run round the back of his skull and meet there like the rupture line on an overripe fruit and his brains and teeth and palate would come tumbling out onto the stage.

"But I don't expect you to care about that," he said. "All you Gen Z know is negativity. You're so risk averse because you've been coddled your whole lives. Thorium Enterprises, you know, now they're risk takes. They signed a contract with us. You know, when I was your age I was--"

Credibly accused of rape, she thought. A source in FORGEX had sent her that memo from the general counsel. But she gulped, fidgeted. She couldn't say that, it might endanger whoever had sent her that email. She could still see the subject line, with its little bit of Joyce's Dubliners:

FORGEX:

That region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.

And all that had nothing to do with shareholder value, with the run rate of data centers or the wastewater generated by the cooling apparatuses for all that compute power in the Mojave desert.

She spoke without hearing what Lawrence was saying, some minor anecdote about bootstrapping his way up after the recessions. No mention of the trust fund.

"See, I called Thorium," she said. "I won't burn my person there, but I called them. They said that they were buying it because the C-suite wanted to be able to say their people knew how to use an LLM if the clients called. That's not a use case."

Alina shifted in her chair.

"So why should, say, a middle manager at firm with a large client list buy a mediocre chatbot that costs 10x in energy inputs what fucking Siri costs, if not more? And don't say innovation, Lawrence," she said. "That might work for all those LinkedIn Influencers, but Shockley, Shockley and Berkowitz has clients, not readers and they expect due diligence. So pitch me a use case."

"Well for one," he said. "It will replace doomsaying Luddites like you. Run our 10-Q through our LLM and it'll tell you all about our investment strategies and our key revenue generating segments, including our General Intelligence R&D projects. Wouldn't you all like that," he turned to the audience. "An analyst that doesn't fucking lie."

A roar of applause, a wave of laughter. Alina felt small. The wave of the noise was so great she fell back against her seat, beaten down. She couldn't move. When it died away, Lawrence was grinning at her.

"See," he said. "No response from Shockley, Shockley Full-o-shit."

"It certainly is irresponsible to accuse a publicly traded firm of malfeasance," the moderator said. "With just some intuition."

---

She stormed out of the hall. Her flats felt thin on the hard, industrial gray flooring. Across the darkened underfloor to the great stairs, then up into the bright glow of the central conference center: the show floor. All round her stood robots, software companies, drone manufacturers, financial instrument exchange firms, real estate pricing algorithm companies, management consultants. A mess of suit coats on top of jeans, elevated sneakers, cheap dress shoes with white plastic soles, techwear polos. The National Innovation and Operations Association, America's finest collection of business and technology minds had gathered in Chicago for a week of revelry and dealmaking.

Shockley, Shockley and Berkowitz put her up in the hotel tower attached to the convention center this year, her second year attending, but she hated it. She wanted out, she wanted to feel her body move, to see the city around her slip and shift and change, the way she had the year prior, when she stayed in an AirBNB near Chicago and Ashland.

Out there she would know. Know she was real and that it was the stifling atmosphere, the industrial carpet, the powerpoints and relentless optimism that were false.

Even if the audience refused to know. They had, of course, refused to know anything, laughing and clapping on cue for Lawrence like a band of trained seals. And at the end, the reporter from Tech Forum, Freddie, following her with a pad: "What grudge do you have against FORGEX?"

She had three days left in the city now, three long days before the flight back to Philadelphia--she wasn't a New Yorker, never could be, and Shockley, Shockley and Berkowitz kept its old regional offices open.

Every fiber in her being told her to walk, to head uptown or out to the lake, but when she got to the hotel doors she saw the rain whipping down and the hard wind blowing. The big temperature display on the parking structure across the drive read 32 Fahrenheit.

All she had was the shell of a rainjacket.

Where then?

---

She got off on the 13th floor and went to her room and took a shower, counting on the hot water to make her feel clean, to hide the tears of stress and humiliation from the panel.

From her room, she could see the avenue running north and south, the drive out west, no lake view for her, just the dismal columns of analysts and pitchmen heading for the nearby bars and the dingy hotels blocks and blocks away. They couldn't fit 30,000 people in the hotel.

---

But from the bar on the fortieth floor she could see out to the far horizon, the lake shrouded in gray rain, its surface the same color as the sky, while night fell early under the dark cloud blanket. She had a kamikaze in her left hand, the cold fingers of her right tucked under her left arm so her black sweater might warm them.

The bartender put a little bowl of peanuts in front of her and nodded towards a loud table in the back.

"They want to know what you're drinking," he said.

"Don't tell them."

"Oh?"

"They're not my friends," she said.

"They bothering you?"

"No," she said. "It's all collegial." She smiled up at him. "Just a little competitive. May as well have a round with them."

There he was, Lawrence Reynolds with his coterie of men, most younger, most thinner, most weaker, all wearing tech fabrics or too-tight suit jackets with mismatched pants, all watching as she approached from the bar, the kamikaze balanced on the palm of her hand.

"Sit. Drink," Lawrence said.

There was one open chair at the table, not next to Lawrence but almost. Between her and the CEO sat a ruddy, high-cheeked man of about 30. Where most of the others had the posture and clothing of tech workers, this red-faced specimen--even his hair seemed to blush--had a brown sports coat and dark monkstraps and, to her surprise, an analog watch. The rest wore apple watches.

"Colin," he offered her his hand.

"Alina," she said. "Grachev."

"Colin Joyce," he said, when she took his hand. "So you're the researcher giving him gray hairs?" He gestured to Lawrence.

"He doesn't seem bothered by me," she said.

"That's where you're wrong," Colin said. "I saw him sweating this morning. Should've seen him practicing his lines."

"What do you do for FORGEX?"

Colin unbuttoned his jacket and she saw, in the well-tailored flank, the walnut grip of a revolver.

"Sometimes you need an old fashioned man," Colin said.

Lawrence, who'd been eyeing Alina all this while, took the moment to interject and advanced on his bodyguard's left shoulder.

"This is part of what I was saying, Alina."

"It's Ms. Grachev," she said. "To you."

A taut silence fell.

"Alina," he said. His lackeys let out their breath. "The world's moved on from your values. But people like you resist that. Some of them resist it religiously, which is why I need Colin here--top of his class in the Foreign Legion--"

"Bottom actually," Colin said. "Top of my boy scout troop."

"In case someone takes that pessimism too far. The haters don't understand that digital life is coming, whether they like it or not. If it can be digitized, it will be, down to the fucking brainstem."

"Maybe they do understand it," Alina said, and drained her drink. "Better than you."

He shrugged, motioned for a waiter. "Old fashioneds for my old fashioneds?" Lawrence said.

That's how it went, appetizers, bad jokes, half-shouted conversations with the tightening knot of Lawrence lackeys. But anything was better than the cold desolation of her room, the loneliness down there, on the thirteenth floor, writing the first section of her conference debrief. Fourteen months as an analyst and still she never felt confident in her claims, never found a strength in her assertions that made it possible for her to work off the clock.

She put away the old fashioned. She got a little light headed. She ordered another kamikaze. By then the bar was packed and the hotel workers threw open the doors to the upstairs ballroom where a smoke machine and a bad EDM DJ started the conference's Night-2-Party.

Everyone got up, went in. She drank more. Danced a bit. But everywhere she went she could feel eyes on her. How many of these people had laughed at her? Would laugh at her given the chance? How many of them depended on the same dishonest schemes as FORGEX? And what would happen if it all stopped?

Then she found herself in the densest part of the crowd, where Lawrence was dancing with his suit jacket off and Colin stood, bobbing his head with arms crossed.

She had a drink in her hand, wherefrom she wasn't sure. The bar maybe? One of the passing waiters? She sidled close to Lawrence as one song fell to the next, felt his eyes on her.

"You know I'm right," she said. "The markets will figure that out, sooner or later."

"That's a gamble I'm willing to take," he said. "Spend money to make money. That's how you change the world. That's power."

Then the music rose and the crowd surged and she felt a heat rising around her, dry and fervid one moment, the next full of sweat and desperation and--

Cold.

A flat, gray cold in her limbs.

Light poured in from half-closed curtains facing the gray expanse of the city, still covered in its low banks of rolling rain. No, too white for rain. Snow. Morning then.

Wait.

Not the city. Too flat for that, no other towers in sight. No glowing lights. Just a level sheet of blue-gray: Lake Michigan.

Alina sat up. Where was her watch? Her head swam. It'd been forever since she'd gotten that drunk that publicly. Still drunk when she woke up on the floor, wrapped in one of those complimentary hotel robes.

A big clock on one wall read 6:47.

Odd. Her room didn't have a clock on the wall, just a little digital number on the nightstand.

Then, of course, her room lacked a lake view. So whose was it?

She got uneasily to her feet, surprised to find she was wearing heels. Whose heels? Where were her flats? She staggered a little, unsteady.

Who had she gone home with? One of the Wall Street boys? She saw a figure in the king bed in the middle of the room, still hidden in shadow. First order of business: water. Then she would come back, see who he was. See if they'd fucked. So long since she'd had a one-night stand. She'd forgotten the vague fear of the mornings after, the rusty feeling in the joints, the cold of alcoholic sleep that turned to heat as soon as she moved.

She shed the robe when she entered the bathroom, a massive room, as big as her hotel room, with a walk-in shower and a giant tub and a high-tech toilet and no little cups for water.

When she had gulped down a couple handfuls of tap water, Alina Grachev stood up and saw herself.

Her hand went to her throat first, to confirm what was really there: a collar with a clip for a leash. Then to her cheek, swollen with a bruise already starting to darken. As she stood there, she felt the generalized unease of her body concentrate, fall to specific places: a band of chafed skin darkening at each wrist, bruises on her chest in the shape of a mouth, teeth marks around her right nipple.

The vague notions of a one-night stand coalesced into something much darker.

She hesitated to look below her waist in the mirror. Then, haltingly, she forced her eyes down. Her black panties, lacy with a sheer front, had been pulled to the side and there--her stomach twisted in knots and she felt an ugly foreign presence inside her for the first time--the pink tail of a remote vibrator showed, hanging just under her clit. She looked over her shoulder, down. Her underwear pulled totally off center, something slick in her ass crack, lube and cum.

And a dull throb in the muscle, a raw, shorn feeling on the skin. As she breathed she registered sharper pangs, like the occasional flashes of pain after sex she often felt, but magnified, with a low, dull ache connecting the isolated pricks of hot pain, like a bruise inside her.

The vibrator started.

She nearly screamed. She it shook against the walls of her cunt and her hair stood on end as she fought back this horror. It felt like a speculum inside her, all intrusion and no intimacy, an object placed purely of its utility and never wanted or needed.

She reached down to grasp it and pull it out, but before she could it shifted from a constant buzz to a ringing pulse and she heard herself moan and her legs shuddered.

Then the door opened and Colin Joyce stood there with a control app visible on the screen of his cellphone.

"Should've checked here first," he said. "Didn't need to do that to you." He spoke with such genuine consideration and regret that it threw her for a loop. He stood in a brown suit with a wine colored tie, already made up for the day, this time with suede tassel loafers.

"No? I--what?"

He held the door open, gestured for her to come forward.

"Still a little drunk, aren't you?"

"I-I-I've been--I think I've been raped," she said.

He sighed. "Put the robe on."

She did as he said, then he grabbed her shoulder, led her out of the bathroom and through the bedroom, talking all the while, a flood of insinuations and apologies and half-acknowledgments like: "You sure did have a party in here last night. I'm not surprised you're a little tired. Let's get you cleaned up. You're not the first girl to have a long night at this conference."